"The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" Part 1 Quiz

Answer:

About the words
Did you notice, all the words you needed to fill in are nouns? A noun is a word that names a person, place or thing. All these nouns are things except, of course, for 'Pussy,' who is definitely a person.

A sea is a body of saltwater smaller than an ocean. In fact, distinct areas within oceans are often called seas. The Mediterranean, South China and Tasman are seas you might have heard of. More generally, the words 'sea' and 'ocean' are often used interchangeably. For instance, we always say 'go to sea', never 'go to ocean'.

A pea is a small, round (sometimes wrinkly) green vegetable. Peas grow in pods that develop on the pea plant. They come mushy in cans or crispy in freezer bags. If you can get fresh peas you're lucky because, like with any veggie or fruit, fresh peas are best.

Honey is a sweet substance, of a lovely amber color, made by bees. Though it's not exactly a liquid, sometimes it is thin enough to pour. It is yummy on English muffins or crumpets and in tea. Indeed, it is an altogether wonderful thing. And yet, honey is very sticky. So, wrapping it up with money, which is to say coins, in a five-pound note, which is to say paper, wouldn't be the most practical of ideas. But then, the Owl and the Pussy-Cat don't seem to be very practical people.

A pound is both a unit by which weight can be measured and a unit of money. The two meanings are actually related. When trading first began, many thousands of years ago at the dawn of civilization, you might give five pounds of peas, say, for one pound of honey, because peas are more abundant and easier to get than honey. In time, standard tokens were developed for use in trade. The tokens that are probably most familiar to us today are small discs of precious and semiprecious metal (gold, silver and copper) with fixed values. You guessed it, I mean coins. As prices gradually rose over time so it took more coins to buy things, paper money was introduced. Paper is a lot lighter and takes up a lot less room than sacks of coins! So banknotes, like the five-pound note, came into being. When our poem was published, in 1871, five pounds was rather a lot of money.

Our sun, sometimes called Sol, is a star. To quote a popular song ("Why Does the Sun Shine?", written by Hy Zaret):

"The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is fused into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees"

Yes, well, that is true, but most of us think of stars in rather less technical terms. A star is a light in the sky. Some stars are close enough for us to see them as individual points of light in the shapes they form - shapes called constellations and asterisms. But some stars are so far away, we can only see them as glowing mist. There are uncountable masses of stars in our galaxy, which is known as the Milky Way, and uncountable masses of galaxies in the universe. If you've ever been lucky enough to be in a place far away from artificial lights, and looked up at the sky on a clear night, you have seen how beautiful the stars are.

Guitars come in many varieties. But no matter its size or shape, a guitar is a stringed instrument played with the fingers, sometimes with the help of a small tool called a plectrum or pick. It is often used to accompany singing, the way the Owl uses it here.

Love is a feeling of deep affection and attachment. In the phrase 'my love', it signifies the particular person who is the object of that deep affection and attachment, a lot like saying 'my dear' or 'my own'.

A pussy-cat or kitty-cat is, well, a cat. In this case, Pussy also seems to be her name.